GALERIE V KAPLI

GALERIE DAVID GUIRAUD

Gellages and Glass works in Galerie David Guiraud, 5, rue de Perche, Paris. (tel: +33 (0)1 42717862, dgphotographies@orange.fr). The exhibition will run from June 3rd to July 19th, 2008. The opening show: May 31

MICHAL MACKU - BILDER VOM MENCHEN

Gellage

Since the end of 1989, Michal Macku has used his own creative technique which he has named "Gellage" (the ligature of collage and gelatin).

The technique consists of transfer the exposed and fixed photographic emulsion from its original base on paper. This transparent and plastic gelatin substance makes it possible to reshape and reform the original images, changing their relationships and endowing them with new meanings during the transfer. The finished work gives a compact image with a fine surface structure. Created on photographic quality paper, each Gellage is a highly durable print eminently suited for collecting and exhibiting.

The laborious technology, which often includes the use of more than one negative per image, makes it impossible to produce absolutely identical prints: Each Gellage is an original work of art. The artist does make at least 12 signed and numbered prints of each image.

Michal Macku talks about his work:
"I use the nude human body (mostly my own) in my pictures. Through the photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work.
I am always seeking new means of expression and, step by step, I am discovering almost unlimited possibilities through my work with loosened gelatin. Photographic pictures mean specific touch with concrete reality for me, one captured level of real time. The technique of Gellage which I am using helps me to take one of these "time sheets" and release a figure, a human body, from it, causing it to depend on time again. Its charm is similar to that of cartoon animation, but it is not a trick. It is very important for me to be aware of the history of a picture and to have a sense of direct contact with its reality. My work places "body pictures" in new situations, new contexts, new realities, causing their "authentic" reality to become relative. I am interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it. Naturally, I start out with a concrete intention, but the result is often very different. And there, I believe, lies a hitch. One creates to communicate what can not be expressed in any other way. Then comes the need to describe, to define."

Carbon Prints

Since 2000 Macku uses also other historical photographic techniques in combination with the technique GELLAGE. After experiments with heliogravure, platinum and kallitype he mastered technique of carbon printing. He was provided for working with original negatives of a real master of this technique and one of the legend of Czech photography - worldwide well known photographer Frantisek Drtikol.

The carbon prints are sized approx. 35x30 cm (14x12''), on a top quality graphic watermark paper, stamped and signed and the edition of each motif is limited to 24 numbered copies.

About the CARBON technique
Text from book called: The Book of Carbon and Carbro: Contemporary Procedures for Monochrome Pigment Printmaking. For more information contact author: Sandy King

In versatility and range of possibilities, carbon is a superb process. It is capable of presenting images with a wide range of image characteristics, of virtually any color or tone, and on a wide variety of surfaces. During the entire period of its history when it co-existed with other commercial processes in the second half of 19th century, carbon was considered the aristocrat of printing processes. Carbon prints were more costly than those produced by other processes, about twice as expensive as platinum and three to five times as much as silver. On the other hand, the technique is very difficult to work. But once mastered, carbon process offers a range of possibilities not available with any other photographic system, and difficult to, if not impossible, to duplicate.

The carbon process, like all pigment processes depends upon the fact that colloids (gelatin, gum, albumen, casein etc.), when applied to a suitable support, sensitized with a dichromate salt and activated by exposure to light change their physical characteristics in proportion to the intensity of the chemical or light. The process, called tanning or hardening, makes the colloid insoluble in hot water.

Carbon prints can be made to look virtually indistinguishable from silver prints. Because of their discernible relief, carbon images often have greater apparent sharpness than of silver prints. The archival qualities of carbon prints are superior to those derived from silver salt papers. The stability of carbon is limited only by the gelatin carrier and its paper base, making it the most stable of all photographic processes.

Commercial Carbon Printing:
Please contact Michal Macku for more information about commercial carbon printing for museums, collectors, photographers and artists He uses to work with both vintage and contemporary negatives. There is also available retouching and renovation broken glass negatives and vintage prints.

Glass Objects

Michal Macků combines in this work his gellages technique with large format historic photographic processes and state-of-the-art technology to create the 3D glass photographs-objects, so called glass gellages.Show Glass Object in Flash (swf file)

Michal more and more recognizes that human life is so amazing and magical that any biography is superfluous.

The Metamorphosis of Macku, text by Walter Guadagnini

“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you and of
which you will soon see the wonderful results. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied
for about three years with his discovery. The academy, the king and all those who have seen his images have
admired them just as you are admiring them in this moment, however much he may still deem them imperfect.”
This is the renowned opening to the letter which accompanied the ‘Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man’ by Hyppolite
Bayard, produced on 18th October 1840: the creation of this photograph was to mark photography’s début in the
world of artifice, in the construction rather than the reproduction of reality. Ambiguity in the relationships between
text and image, tricks in both the shooting and the printing phase, additions and subtractions, technical errors,
the overlapping of the medium with other disciplines: over the course of more than one and a half centuries, the
history of photography has also been one of cheats, more or less conscientious lies, of inventions and re-inventions
of reality. A history of bodies replicated ad infinitum, be they acephalous or with a thousand heads, of phantomatic
appearances, impossible equilibria, of oval wheels, of minotaurs, of distortions and glass tears, to name but a
few of the photographic icons invented. The reasons behind this betrayal are many and varied, ranging from the
claims to artistic value of photography, which date back to soon after the middle of the 19th century, to the pure
divertissement of photo amateurs from every walk of life; from the revolutionary desire of the historical avant-garde
in the early 20th century to the more verbose needs of politics and propaganda bound up in it. Be as it may, the
inside of the camera and the darkroom were for many decades the stage of exceptional alchemy, or in the words of
Salvador Dalì, an artist considered something of an expert in the field of cheats and mis-en-scéne, “the Zeiss lens
possesses an unexpected potential to surprise.”
Now, it’s clear that Michal Macku is part of this tradition and that, indeed, he is currently one of its main
exponents. But it’s because this tradition has been the source of so many profoundly diverse positions that it’s
important to understand under which of the numerous headings his research may be included, where its roots
lie and where its peculiarities come to the fore. For example, it’s clear that the elaboration of an unprecedented
technique such as gellage and the use of an obsolete yet highly refined technique such as the carbon print may
constitute the starting point for a reading of these works. Macku operates on the edge of photography in terms of
a means of mechanical production of data from the outside world; for him, the camera is the tools that triggers
the creative process, but it by no means completes it. It is the medium which allows him to objectivise a vision, to
make perceptable the ‘having been’ of that body, in that situation. It also makes it possible to capture an action,
a gesture or an expression outside of time, yet one which took place in real time; in this sense, his photography
responds to that original characteristic of offering traces of the real, which the artist exploits to bind his own
narrative to the physical nature of the body. The following intervention, the one that provokes cuts, wounds,
disappearances and multiple appearances – in other words, all that which belongs to gellage and the printing
process in a figurative sense – leads Macku into the field of the pure invention of imagery, giving up the ghost that
originally appeared on the photographic surface. It is as if the artist found himself before a semi-forged image, and
which to be made complete must be approached with a different medium: it is no coincindence if the term that the
artist uses comes from the fusion of ‘gelatin’ and ‘collage’, for the very sense of his work is indeed set off it in this
grey area between the two.
In this regard, it is clearly not by chance that Macku works almost exclusively with the human body, that this is
his only subject. If his images are examined in rapid succession, the constant reference to the forms of posture,
construction and appearance of the figure come to light, dating right back to the origins of sculptural practices.
Apart from the evident reference to the kouros of the ancient Greek tradition – together with the notion of totemic
verticality of the body and of the idol – explicit references may also be noted to classic statuary elements, be it
in the poses (from his ‘Discobolo’ to the ‘Prigioni’ to the ‘Pensatore’), or in some of his iconography which draws
on this tradition in terms of visual tradition, in which the absence of a part of the body immediately leads the
onlooker’s subconscious back to that specific sphere of classical forms.
These choices also explain the use of the technique of gellage as a medium that works by subtraction, which picks
out the form from within matter or, on other occasions, shapes it. At the same time this makes Macku’s passage
towards his three-dimensional glass objects all the more natural, for they come even closer to sculpture in material
terms.
Hence, this is photography which lies at a crossroads between different media, yet photography which also lays
claim to its own specificity just when it borders on other disciplines, for it is through this medium that Macku may
display his own particular attitude towards that body which is not only his primary source of inspiration, but also
the main channel by which he narrates the world. In these works, the body may be featured either in singular or
plural terms, but it is in any case the absolute protagonist of the scene. The sculpture theme comes to the fore
once more here, for Macku’s bodies exist almost always within an abstract space, bereft of specific connotations.
In some cases, it is almost possible to see the figures move, float, existing within a space attributable to that of
a room, or at any rate a prospective space suggesting some form of reality, however much it may clearly be far
from any reference to our everyday experience of familiar spaces. This is an absolute space, within which absolute
gestures are carried out, both on behalf of the subjects – which may sometimes even relate to one another – and
that of the creator.
More frequently, however, the surrounding space is not even hinted at; the bodies stand out against surfaces,
the main purpose of which is to serve as a backdrop to the figure, the outright fulcrum of the composition. This
attitude shares something with the pictorial, also by virtue of the tonal refinement of these backdrops, which must
not come across as neutral, but rather as exempt of spatial elements that might be reminiscent of an external
reality. On these surfaces, the body or bodies complete their transfiguration: it is here that the metamorphosis – the
fundamental principle underlying Macku’s research – takes place in the
pureness of its essentiality.
At this point, it seems only natural to refer back to the surrealist
experience, with which the Czech artist seems to have more than one
thing in common (after all, the history of Czech photography is indelebly
marked by a surrealist presence, not so much at the creative level but
at the theoretical one; and alongside better known players such as
Funke and Štyrský, we might also cite a number of curious portraits by
Kašpařík or even a number of city views of Berka, in which the space is
rendered unstable by the technique adopted). In fact Rosalind Krauss
wrote with regard to Raoul Ubac (whose Pénthésilée series is certainly
the most direct reference possible to Macku’s imagery): “Indeed, one
of the ways we can generalize the whole of what we have been seeing
so far is that a variety of photographic methods has been exploited to
produce an image of the invasion of space: of bodies dizzily yielding to
the force of gravity, of bodies in the grip of a deforming perspective, of
bodies decapitated by the projection of shadow; of bodies eaten away by either heat or light. The use of the usual
formulas for explaining surrealist images might lead us to say that this consumption of matter by the spatial ether
is a representation of the upturning of reality, achieved in those metapsychic states so much sought after by the
poets and painters of the movement: be it called rêverie, ecstasy or dreaming.” Despite the obvious differences
in the times and the means of expression, these lines go straight to the heart of Macku’s poetics, highlighting its
visionary nature, which is also expressed through specific choices in the presentation of bodies, in the construction
of their inner space: one which may indeed be better defined metapsychic than metaphysical.
For example, one of the most frequently recurrent compositional strategies in this series is that of presenting the
bodies as acephalous, or at any rate with eyes closed, or even with hands placed in front of the face, not so much
Gellage No. 115
to hide it but rather to highlight the oneriric nature of the image, reminiscent of the blindness of the poet in the
Romantic and symbolist tradition, which in Rimbaud’s voyant encounters both its definitive incarnation and its
ultimate impasse. It is no coincidence that despite the use of his own body as a priviledged subject, Macku’s
research stands apart from that of artists who – even in certain formal details – might appear close to him, from
Arnulf Rainer to Arno Minnkinen. It differs insofar as in the work of these artists, the body is the medium for
research into an identity closely bound up with the individual, the artist himself, whereas the Czech artist conceives
his own body as the medium for a vision of a symbolic character, one of universal value. Despite their appearance,
Macku’s images are never self-portraits: the acknowledgement of his own identity never takes place through the
representation of his own body. Even if in some compositions a clear mood comes to the fore, it always ultimately
takes on the value of a common human experience, not exclusively individual.
In this regard, just as meaningful is the choice to make up the images by joining the subjects – be they whole
bodies or fragments – closely to one another, to create spaces that may be exclusionary: the cages that seem to
made up of arms, for example or attractive, such as the circles formed by bodies and heads looked upon upwards
in order to create a two-fold effect, which defines one of the main characteristics of Macku’s poetics. First of all,
this shooting and composition strategy makes it very difficult to identify the individual subject of which repetition
provides the overall image, forcing the onlooker to stop and adjust his/her gaze and mind to take in an abnormal
sight; secondly, it creates a vortex which draws in that gaze, engendering a restless, disarming situation.
From these visions, in which it is the bodies that create the space, we move over almost seamlessly to those
photographs in which everything is played out on the surface: where the interlinking, overlapping and juxtaposition
of the figures ushers in a great graphic composition, one which may even reach the threshold of abstraction (as
may be seen most clearly in some of his images on glass, in which the iron-wire type passage of the line makes
it possible to draw parallels with yet another discipline, that of drawing, thus completing the extraordinary
wealth of evocations and technical references within these works). In these images, where individuality is turned
into plurality, where the search for individual identity lies between brackets, while reflecting the melting of the
individual within an infinite cosmos, ultimately the deepest and truest sense of this research comes to the fore:
that giving rise to a parallel world, as unreal as it is full of ties with our own concrete experience. A frieze of a world
yet to come.

On the other side (Photography by Michal Macku), Victoria Girenko, "ZOOM Russia" magazine, march-april 2007

"More than anything else an artist is someone who is trying to
go beyond the limitations of being human. They search for the realm
of the unseen and non-human. It is this search for a greater
underlying reality, that they feel exists parallel to the ‘known’ world,
which motivates their work."

Giyom Appoliner

The human body has always been a challenging and complex subject for artists. The narrative language adopted by artists towards the human body is influenced by the cultural and technological context of their time. The skill of some of the world’s greatest painters is showcased in their portraits and nudes. For example the masterpieces of Rubens and Kustodiev evoke in our minds images of pneumatic pink-cheeked ladies radiating health and well-being. We can see their different standards of beauty and aesthetics in their approaches. Such prevailing and varied artistic perceptions of a human body were directly challenged by the advent of photography’s ‘empirical’ eye. The changes that photography caused to humanity’s perception of it’s world have yet to cease occurring.

In Czech photography the human body has always been an object of a close study. Today the human body is becoming a subject for the artists and photographers who are interested not in the erotic but the emotional component of their models. The nude has traditionally been a popular and spectacular genre in photography.By focusing upon the model’s body an opportunity is created to construe the person by dwelling upon their body and it’s connection to nature. This is typical for the collages from the beginning of the 20th century which constructed a new world and a new attitude towards it. Czech photography has continued this tradition of endowing the human body with symbolic meaning.

This emphasis upon symbolism is also typical of the work of Michal Macku. He was born in 1963 in Bruntal and lives in Olomouc. His photographs belong amongst the work of the great Czech photographers: Jaromir Funke, Josef Kudelka, Jan Saudek. In his artwork Macku uses an almost forgotten technique of removing the gelatin from the film base. He has named this technique "gellage" which comes from combination of two words "gelatin" and "collage". Some parts of his images are torn and the thin emulsion is used as wet skin.
Macku describes his process, "...First I cause the chemical separation of the gelatin from its base. Then I work with this wet gellike substance. Next the images are dipped into water which reminds me of the blurred chimeras...this part of the process has always enchanted me. Finally I transfer the image onto wet paper which grounds the image and allows it to become tangible…"

In Macku’s work you can clearly see traces of surrealism, (in the technique of performance) and existentialism (in feelings, interpretation of symbols in the themes of the photographed). Many critics and scholars of Macku’s work call attention to his destructive elements. Destruction is also a key characteristic of surrealists like Gans Bellmer.
Macku acts like a mirror reflecting the conflicts that arise when trying to transcend the known world while still being grounded in it. He work is a lot like what Gans Bellmer does with his dolls. The photographs of this Czech master are on the edge between dreams, mysticism, experience and subtle feeling. In his work we see the predetermination of life yet also the struggle to try to change or challenge this sealed circle of reality called ‘life’. His artwork is full of gestures. His model’s arms are raised or lowered with their palms turned towards the viewer as though offering an opportunity to read their life line. The head is often dropped back, smeared, or ripped off the model entirely. We do not see the face but we contemplate it’s image. We watch the ‘self’ disappearing.

In a series of work by Macku called "Multiplies" he creates images by repeating body parts or entire bodies. In one piece he makes a grate from arms. In another piece he depicts a crowd so one part of a body blends into another body causing the individuals in the crowd loose their personal identity. The individuals in the crowd become an interwoven mass. You can feel the anxiety, protest, curiosity, magic, yearning and even discovery within his work. By viewing his work we agree to obey it’s the mystery and accept his protest against the natural way of life and human history. Macku has reached such a high level of tragedy that he has assumed the existentialist’s point of view for a person’s place in the world.

Viewing his work is like being present at a holy act of initiation we start to serve the cult only to be consecrated. His work reveals glimpses of the mystery contained within our collective archetypes, dreams, subconscious- all the things that point towards a transcendent reality beyond our day to day lives.

THE UNKNOWABLE SCHEME OF THINGS, TEXT BY LANCE SPEER

One after another, stunning oversized prints emerge from their storage box into the cool, crisp halogen light of a downtown Manhattan gallery. The rich grays and blacks of deftly handworked photographic emulsion reveal heads shattering with the chaos of the mind. Figures, both male and female, confront and penetrate each other, betraying the vulnerability of the naked, the tension between the genders. A body rips itself open under the influence of its own restless spirit. Heroic figures attain iconic poses that disassemble and then reconstruct the persistent canons of art history. Figures multiply, grotesquely stretched and contorted, in a repeating cycle of excruciating anonymity. Limbs intertwine, forming some Escheresque mandala, in contradictory complexity and simplicity. Bodies are rent apart by their owners, revealing the luminous peace of spiritual release. All of this is offered through the photographic alchemy of Michal Macku’s vibrantly original vision, one that combines extraordinarily proficient craftsmanship with the pleasures and horrors of the human condition.

Macku was born in 1963 in the former Czechoslovakia. The homeland of his parents’ generation had endured the nightmare of Nazi occupation. His own childhood and early adult years were dominated by the concrete gray days of the Soviet era. His most active and creative period has corresponded with the renewal brought about by the ”Velvet Revolution” of November, 1989, which brought formerly imprisoned poet and playwright Vaclav Havel to power. The political revolutions of Eastern Europe, coupled with the attendant shift from communism to capitalism in many of the former Warsaw Pact nations, coincided with a similarly powerful and as yet unfinished revolution in digital technology.

We are in an era of seamless digital photographs where hands-off manipulation is only a mouse-click away. To many of this new generation of artists the darkroom is nothing more than a quaint relic, as antique as a Daguerreian fuming box. One of the wonders of the new imaging technologies is their seemingly endless plasticity, which gives artists limitless opportunities to arrange and rearrange their photographic compositions. While recognized masters such as Jerry Uelsmann and Doug Prince have been in the darkroom creating complex photographic collages for decades, new technologies drastically simplify this process and make it available to anyone. Simultaneous with the introduction of these new technologies during the past dozen years has been the work of Michal Macku.

Macku received his training at the Technical University of the Polytechnical Institute in Brno and then at the Institute of Creative Photography in Prague. He was trained as a graphic designer, and his current photographic work shares many of the elements of the digital revolution in terms of its freedom of manipulation, yet it is radically different in its production.

Macku has developed a process he terms ”gellage.” The word itself is a contraction of gelatin (as in photographic emulsions) and collage. In this process the photographic gelatin emulsion is separated from its original support through a series of chemical processes. After each semi-transparent surface of emulsion is floated off its substrate, it is cut and torn to exacting shapes and forms and then collaged, one by one, onto fine artist’s paper. The result is a richly layered composition of infinite possibilities, all guided by the direct intercession of the photographer’s hand.

The work Macku has produced in gellage since 1989 reflects a dramatic blending of form and content. Using himself as subject, his masterful works become much more than static, mirrored reflections. Through the manipulation of the self, a reforming of the body, Macku takes the surfaces of the corporeal and shows us ways to understand the depths of the psychological.

His body forms, frozen in photographic emulsion, are literally skinned off. Sometimes cut with surgical precision, other times raggedly lacerated, these skins are reconstructed to create collaged images of tremendous visual and tactile complexity that plumb the depths of the psyche. Recording a kaleidoscopic range of deep emotions through their physical manifestations, Macku creates a vast inventory of moods and expressions. While serving as a form of individual self-discovery, his images show us the self as archetype.

Renaissance masters, particularly those from Northern Europe, often sought to deny the role of paint in their compositions, developing styles that hid their brushstrokes. Dûrer and van Eyck come to mind most readily. The same phenomenon characterizes contemporary digital imaging, where the seamless blending of forms, textures and spaces often seems a major goal of the artist. In Macku’s work, what is ”photographic” about photography is never denied. The original photograph’s birth as light on sensitized surfaces is evident in its unique ability to capture rich gradations of tone, space, form, mass, surface, and texture as is possible in no other medium. Gellage is definitely a hands-on process. It is wet, messy, and results in the creation of distinctly individual pieces, where each image in his standard edition of 12 necessarily exhibits slight variations in its construction. In some respects, Macku’s work has less in common with clean-room digital images than it does with the wet-plate era of photographic history. Back then, practitioners would pour sensitized collodion emulsion over glass plates, make their exposures, and develop the negative while the emulsion was still wet, finally allowing the finished glass plate negative to dry. Here Macku reverses the process – he starts out dry and gets wet as he removes, rather than applies, his emulsion. When considering the process, one can imagine that Macku would find himself much more at home in the dark tent of William Henry Jackson or Francis Frith than in the contemporary software labs at Adobe.

In Macku’s work, the plasticity of photography takes on a more literal meaning. His images, incubated in fluids, grow layer by layer, completely dependent on the elasticity, transparency and photographic detail inherent in the medium. As photographic objects, the surface textures of Macku’s large 20” x 25” prints are enhanced by the subtle impasto of his fractured and folded emulsions. At once present and absent, his background grays are often created by applying a uniform layer of emulsion to serve as a stage for the dramas of his foreground figures. Exhibiting the visual texture of a fine aquatint, these backgrounds offer us both spatial perspective and a blank slate for the action of his figures.

His images clearly reveal the hand of the creator in their intricate folds, cuts and tears. In some cases Macku rips pieces of emulsion apart to form rough mosaics, often of a subject’s head, where jagged and exploded bits of emulsion become individual tesserae, as in #71 (1994). Here each figure’s head, the center of reason and logic, passion and psyche, fragments under the stress of unseen forces. In a moment of shock and surprise, as suggested by the pose of the arms and hands, the figure’s body remains intact while his mind erupts. The physical residue of this explosion continues to orbit above the torso, but the content of the mind is released. This motif appears time and again in different contexts in the work of Michal Macku.

In Edvard Munch’s The Scream we are witness to the internal anguish of a roiling mind resonating through a silent scream, one that forever echoes through the power of its simple yet dramatic composition. The hands grip the face in a gesture of fear, horribly amplifying the scream by framing the mind of its source. In #7 (1989), rather than exploding under the influence of some external force, Macku uses his own hands to tear at the fabric of his being. Rigidly clenched fingers claw at his face and torso, ripping away his physical flesh while scraping his fingernails across the chalkboard of his soul. In both works what is happening internally is the point of the image. Psychology transcends the physical. We share the self(d)effacing gesture of Macku’s portrait, a violent moment of angst, fear, self-loathing, and perhaps even the struggle to break free from the mortal vessel. The physicality of torn emulsion becomes a metaphor for the damage of the torn soul. There is a scream present here, and the very fact that it cannot emanate from the obliterated mouth makes it all the more intense. Greater in volume and tenor due specifically to its silence, Macku’s scream is not one of appeal to others. It is rather one of personal desperation, frustration, release. The physical tears scratch the surface, but it is the soul that carries the scars. Without a face this individual becomes the whole, the archetype.

Another level of interpretation begins to take shape in the physical and mental disintegration of this individual. The tears open the skin to reveal a soft, luminous light. Rather than seeing the continuation of background textures and tones through these tears, as might be expected, we instead see a new space characterized by comfortable emptiness, devoid of anything other than pure light. What is this place? The ragged tears become portals through the veil of the physical into a new plane of existence. Limbo, nirvana, or a transitional zone between points of reincarnation, this incandescent space offers the viewer a glimpse of quiet in the midst of the extreme trauma that characterizes the rest of the image. Also fascinating is the fact that, in terms of its actual photographic composition, it is constructed of nothing more than plain white space. The irony here seems to reside in the fact that this luminous peace, as a state of being and of mind, is reached only through the most horrific of gestures.

Macku’s #39 (1991) is unmistakably patterned directly from the Diskobolis (Discus Thrower). The Roman marble sculpture familiar to most students of art history is itself patterned after a no longer extant Greek bronze attributed to Myron (c.450 bc). Except for slight variations in overall pose, the iconographic pedigree of this image cannot be denied. Yet the self-assured determination of Myron’s original gives way here to a much more dramatic pathos. Macku’s athlete is castrated, not so much by the shadows that obscure his genitals, but by the loss of his throwing arm. However, he would remain impotent even if it were present, as evidenced by the wall against which the figure cocks himself. The Venus de Milo has, over the ages, lost her arms. This unplanned amputation, however, oddly serves to enhance and amplify her feminine characteristics, as the viewer focuses on her elegant contrapposto, the sensuous curves of her body, her breasts. In the Diskobolis the angle and thrust of the arms, legs and torso draw the viewer’s attention to the head. For all the physical perfection of the body the head remains the overall focal point, a study in quiet Olympian determination. In Macku’s work, the head is shriveled and flaccid, reinforcing the emasculation conveyed in the rest of the figure. This dark fear, suggested rather than described, subliminally haunts every man. Without a face to lend it a specific identity, anonymity makes the work universal.

Variations on the themes of masculinity and emasculation take some unusual turns in the work of Macku. In image after image the most prominent element of ”maleness” is the muscular body. Often, even in his full frontal nudes, he omits the penis but depicts the testicles. This is important. In Western culture the signifier of masculinity is the penis, as physical presence and as storied metaphor. Certainly it is the locus of physical pleasure in the male and is one of the symbolic centers of the male persona. In Macku’s images where the penis is present it is often veiled in emulsion. It is also never erect. It takes on a secondary importance, subdued to the point of near non-existence. In some of Macku’s strongest images it is instead the testicles that dominate the genital zone, even when only partially revealed. Dark masses set against his signature backgrounds, the testicles hang in ways that unmistakably draw attention to their presence.

These depictions imply a more highly refined sense of manhood. While the penis is the iconic signifier of the male, from Neolithic cave paintings to Michelangelo to crude scrawls on men’s room walls, it is the testicles that really run the show. They are the point of manufacture of sperm, the seed of future generations. As the well-springs of testosterone, the testicles influence much more than the physical appearance of the male. Volumes have been written on the importance of this chemical in the psychological drives inherent in men. These are subtle points, and they are continually raised by Macku by his frequent use of these organs. It perhaps may have been too heavy handed for Macku to place his emphasis on a more overt photographic rendering of the penis. By bringing the testicles to the fore he states his point of male identity, yet in a way that is more visually interesting and intellectually challenging.

An example of Macku’s depiction of testicles is evident in #80 (1995). We witness a surrealistic scene, perhaps an imaginary pediment frieze from the Parthenon. Fragments of Herculean figures struggle in mortal combat, their straining bodies frozen in an eternal, shattering conflict. Here the rich surfaces and detailed musculature of Classical Period marble is replaced with a similarly exacting emulsion. The prominence of the testicles on the left hand figure is no accident. The gellage process is so infinitely flexible that it would have allowed Macku to remove or diminish these organs if he had so desired. Their presence can only mean that he intended their inclusion all along. In the context of this image, as well as of others of similar construction, the figures can be read as either two separate combatants or as one individual. In the former, these two bodies share an impossible existence. They are headlessly conjoined in a fantastic form of mindless (literally) hand-to-hand warfare that is powered, as such acts often are, by the potency of testosterone. An alternative reading of this image may view these bodies as a single creature. Two halves, as it were, of the whole individual, suggesting the schizophrenic conflict we share with our own personal doppelgangers.

Epic struggles, whether physical or psychological, are not always the rule in Macku’s work. In some ways his most intriguing images are marked not by jarring visuals or by the silent sounds of shattering flesh. In #104 (1997), the artist depicts himself as a solitary figure. Multiple layers of gellage emulsion crack and fold across his body, yet much more subtly than in many of his other works. His hands are firmly positioned behind his back, almost as if they were tied, which, while hinting at a heightened sense of vulnerability, can also be seen as adding to the quiet peace of this composition.

To continue the arbitrary associations to Greek art, he most closely resembles a kouros figure, one that blends the rigid stasis of the Archaic Period with the exacting, almost photographic clarity of the human form that emerged in the Classical Period. His eyes are closed, as if in a dream of death. He floats in the void, where the lack of earthly gravity negates the need for feet, which have dissolved into nothingness. Is this a self portrait of the artist as he sees himself after death – naked, peaceful, adrift. A second reading could reinterpret the gestalt of this pose, as he strangely takes on the characteristic form of a Greek amphora, a clay vessel used for the storage and transport of ancient wines and oils. In this reading the body is the vessel. Depending upon one’s point of view this body/vessel either once contained, still contains, or will someday contain again the spirit of life.

Macku is interested in the tenets of Hinduism. This perhaps explains much of his work: the restless struggle of the spirit; the apparent soullessness of humanity; the perfection of the body recast in distorted emulsion; the anonymity of manufactured individuals; the endless reach for another plane of existence; the tensions and energies of life, frozen for the split second between this moment and the next. It may be easy to consider Macku in the light of other eras, styles and artists (Eikoh Hosoe meets Salvador Dali; M.C. Escher meets Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; Hieronymus Bosch meets Howard Schatz). Yet one of the most intriguing aspects of Macku’s work is its sheer originality. It is a seamless blend of form and content, with the artist’s idea perfectly corresponding to the process of its realization. We admire Machu’s work from the outside and are simultaneously invited to occupy the bodies and minds of his subject(s), most often himself, from the inside.

Sensuous, challenging, beautiful, terrifying. His work has a presence that draws the viewer in, allowing for myriad interpretations where the individual becomes the universal. Macku’s nudes, unencumbered by the trappings of any one culture or the limits set forth by formal titles, resonate across a wide spectrum of moods and emotions. They serve as signposts, as good art always does, in our quest to seek ourselves in the context of our own lives and in the greater and unknowable scheme of things.

Vladimír Birgus, Prague, February 1996

Czech photography has a very good reputation in the world today, thanks not only to famous authors such as: František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rossler, Josef Koudelka or Jan Saudek, but also to many photographers of a younger generation, whose works came out onto the international scene after the revolutionary changes in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of 1989. Among young Czech photographers with an ever-growing international reputation is undoubtedly Michal Macku, whose original photography aroused great attention at a series of both separate and group exhibitions in Europe and overseas, and they were also housed as collections in a few distinguished museums and galleries.

Michal Macku took up photography by the time of his studies at grammar school and then at Technical University in Brno, when he was concerned, above all, with various static motifs. His first mature works created at the Institute of Creative Photography during the years 1986 - 88. At this time he started - after earlier attempts with a symbolically oriented smaller series of photographs with only lightly suggested multisignificance action - to use and personally develop technology of drawing-off the gelatine emulsion from negatives. He named the results of the procedure "gellages". This demanding technique fully satisfied his ever-growing interest in crossing traditional borders between separate arts and his strengthening struggle for a metaphorical reflection of various weighty themes which can rarely be expressed in words. Already his oldest gellages, which were the final work at the Institute of Creative Photography, took up the theme of the perfect symbiosis of content and form. Highly expressive motifs of human body destruction, symbolising themes of violence and cruelty, as well as mental depression were given an extraordinary impressive form which perfectly utilised the possibilities of subjective reality stylisation by a resourceful arrangement of moist gelatine including its breaking up, spatial distortions or elimination of disturbing details. Through this method were created sensually extraordinary cogent pictures, whose motifs contained warning messages and dramatic metaphors of anxiety and brutality. Many motifs emerged later in an existentially mooted short film "Process" (1994), which Michal Macku made in co-operation with a Czech TV studio in Brno. The film is an allegorical portrayal of human life using very impressive (not only unusual) animation possibilities of photography emulsion, but also original music by Irena and Vojtìch Havel.

After a series of gellages with motifs of broken bodies, followed more exalted works and motifs of crying heads, in which Michal Macku first used the multiplication of the same motifs. Multiplication achieved the basic principle of the following set with repeated archetypal figures of men, whose raised hands evoked, not only feelings of defencelessness but also some mysterious signs from a magical exorcism. Scrimmages of identical figures create visions of crowds of lonely people, who are losing their individuality in a crowd, which according to the author's words "does not behave as a group of individualities but as a separate dangerous organism". Macku here resourcefully used an abstract background of a nearly compact grey area, which creates a sort of empty yawning scene out of concrete space and time, which still more clearly expresses the atmosphere of eradication and nothingness. There were also new changes of figure dimensions from the same negative, which were also used by the author in many other works.

Michal Macku - with only a few exceptions - uses himself as a pattern for his figures because he knows intimately his own body and that is why he can express himself more precisely than by taking photographs of someone else´s body. It is understandable that this self-recognition and self-searching has a metaphorical impact on his pictorial themes. Out of which grows the author's interest in extrarational spheres of recognition, some aspects of Buddhism and other philosophical and religious systems, in a dualism of corporeality and spirituality.

It can be very expressively shown on a free cycle of gellages with motifs of figures and their silhouettes, in which the silhouettes represent a sort of ideal, whose qualities real bodies do not reach. In spite of an undoubted resourcefulness and emotive impact of such works, it clearly emerged that there were considerable problems of the coherence of the author's and beholders mind. This problem got even deeper in a further picture series with motifs of communicating parts of the bodies or whole figures. Too much coded content had the result, that significant sections of beholders perceived, above all, the technically precise production and a small part of decorative conception, in which there was a considerably suppressed dramatic character and expressive extremity of preceding photographs, but they escaped deeper meaning of these works. More recently, the author - following an imaginary spiral - came back to the motifs and themes of his oldest gellages, with expressively deformed individual bodies, as well as more figures in which the problems of relations between people are often symbolically emphasised. At the same the author's interest in non-traditional forms of gellage presentation becomes apparent. This is also connected in some installations with music and three-dimensional objects, as well as his interest in other experiments in the area of film animation.

Michal Macku has an extraordinary and sole position in the current branch of stage and intermediate photography in the Czech Republic. Above all post-modern oriented younger representatives, as their contemporaries from a number of painters and sculptors during the eighties, ostentatiously diverted from the expressive treatment of tragic themes, which can be found in works by Jiøí Sozanský, Jiøí Anderle, Olbram Zoubek, Karel Pauzer and many other representatives of the previous art generation and created works full of facility, humour and free of conflicts. Macku admittedly accepted from postmodernism an opposition to long decades of stressed cleanness of the photographic medium, as well as an effort for the fusion of various art branches, but (similarly as for example Ivan Pinkava, group Bratrstrvo or Michaela Brachtová) seeing the conception of art as a non-binding game. His philosophically deep, formally revealing as well as technically precise works are enriching current Czech photography.

JŠ - Michal, I remember how you used to come to see me and bring me your photographs - that was a lot earlier, wasn't it?

MM - Yeah, of course, that was during Gymnasium, sometime around 1980.

JŠ - I remember that already then there were photographs which didn't require too much commentary. Their form was always perfect and I feel it stayed with you. But back then you didn't take pictures of people.

MM - You see, it's interesting to hear this. The photographs from that period (which are somewhere deep in my drawers) don´t mean anything to me anymore. I feel I did them like everyone else, simply a kind of search of an adolescent person. But my visites to you and your opinions then were very important for me.

LD - At the time you were also a member of the photography group at the Folk School of Art in Olomouc. I remember one of your group exhibition in the Gallery "Pod podloubím". What role did this play?

MM - The Folk School of Art had more of a practical significance. That's where I got to know Dr. Stibor, an old practitioner, an excellent person and a great companion. He showed us that one can make a living with photography. All of a sudden there was a regular guy and not an artist with a capital A. I saw that art is a normal thing which can be done practically. That was very useful. On top of it I met people from Olomouc, where I was then starting out.

JŠ - And the things you do now, you started after the Institute?

MM - No, I already started that there. My final work consisted of gellages. I actually didn't know for quite a long time what I would do for my graduate work. And then suddenly a friend of mine came to tell me, that in some old handbook he found a mention about the possibility to remove gelatine from sheets of glass. We tried it and it worked. Then I actually created the first trio of gellages, the torn up heads. Not until a few years later did I realise, that in effect it was also a symbolic opening of the head, a turning point, the beginning of a new stage.

JŠ - Did you use sheet films and transfer the exposed gelatine from them onto paper with the help of heat reticulation?

MM - In fact gelatine is separated from the base chemically and you work with it while it's wet, in effect in the form of a gel. The changing, unstable forms the figures have in the water always fascinated me during my work. Then I transfer the image to the soaked paper and that's what enables me to manipulate it precisely into the form I want. And when the composition is finished, I simply let it dry up and stick together. Also when you look at the first photographs you see that it's only one layer. Step by step I was discovering the technique and adding other elements. For instance, with the first gellages of crowds I used a background to which the figures are applied. So that the resulting image is compact. I also began to discover other possibilities, for example, amplification of the figure from one negative. And then I was adding more negatives and their combinations etc. etc. Simply the themes as they emerge little by little. They also go hand in hand with the development and discovery of the technique.

LD - And how did the term "gellage" come about?

MM - I got the idea while working. In essence, it's a ligature of the words gel as in gelatine and collage

LD - How much time do you have, approximately, for one photograph? I mean the actual manipulation with the loose gelatine before it dries up.

MM - Naturally I keep soaking it constantly while working. Of course, there are some technical limitations, for example, if it's warm in the room and I've been working for several hours, the gelatine begins to dissolve or tear or the like. At the beginning, before I got the hang of it, I destroyed more material than I made use of. You cannot do gellage in stages like, for example, a painting. But I can play with it all day if I need to.

JŠ - When I listen to you it occurs to me that it's closely connected with film.

MM - Exactly. That was one of the first things that came to mind when I saw the loose emulsion in water: animated film. You see, to make animated film was always one of my dreams. Unfortunately it's quite laborious for one person without experience but, with the help of this technique, I managed to make a short film in the Czech television Brno and I would definitely like to return to it.

JŠ - It seems to me that it's important to you that you use your body as a model for your photographs.

MM - Yes. That comes from my earlier work when I used to photograph still life and various details. I withdrew somewhere into the woods or some old house and there I explored, undisturbed. I almost never took pictures of people and when I tried, it often ended in a fiasco. I didn't know how to communicate with them, it disturbed me. And, similarly, I now take pictures of myself. It enables me to do focused work, in effect discovering the self, the physical manifestation of one's being. And when I photograph someone else, it's again a particular person who means something to me and to whom I have a certain affinity. And that's then reflected in the photograph.

LD - Did you ever think about the fact that, for the most part, the viewer of your photographs doesn't know it's your body and, therefore, he/she sees above all male nudes as such? Does your way of presenting your own body perhaps have some deeper level, some further connections?

MM - I've already met with such questions several times. Why do I photograph men and not women? When I take a photo of a women the aesthetic charge is much more present. So to express some kind of a spiritual struggle, it suits me much better to photograph the male nude. I've already met with a lack of understanding in this matter. I simply feel the male and female principle differently, Yin and Yang, sentimentality and expansions, and with it also the female and male body. Simply, I perceive it this way and that's why I´m also a man, that's why I take pictures of myself and so it's all interrelated.

JŠ - In your work, what relationship is there between the technique and the subject? I mean you need to subject the technique to the theme, expression and form.

MM - I actually like the fact that I don´t need to subject myself too much, especially if I consciously stay within the bounds of black and white photography and accept its limitations. On the contrary, the gellage technique gives me a much greater field of activity than the classical photograph would.

JŠ - And what's your intention while taking a picture? Do you photograph haphazardly or do you already have some idea or plan in mind?

MM - That varies. Sometimes I spend a week taking photos and making piles of negatives from which I then choose and compose. In that case I go more by formal ideas, for example, I place the lights differently and then I watch what effect it will have. But very often I already have a composition in my head which I then try to realise. For instance, after one deep experience I have an idea to which I then laboriously try to give form for a long time. In a case like that I work on a particular problem to which I subject the technique and everything else.

JŠ - You began on a certain existential level in your first gellages and then you switched over towards the multiplication of the figure. You began to make the crowd photos and with respect to form, I´d say even decorative ones.

MM - On the contrary, when I made the first pieces, the open head and the destruction of the actual face, I found them too attractive, almost truckling. At the time, I admired artists like Sozanský - piles of broken pieces, blood and so. That's why I was trying to find a technique of how to do it, otherwise more drastically and that's how the gellages of crowds came about. I wanted the final image to have the maximum expression. Even formally I did things in a less attractive way because I placed the picture on a single grey backing sheet and that way, diminished the lights.

JŠ - I think that the political situation of the time is reflected a lot in those photographs.

MM - Surely it is, although not directly. It was an eventful time. You have to realise that I grew up in the seventies. The state which existed in the Republic at the time was normal to me. Therefore, the end of the eighties when a lot of things were beginning to loosen up brought me a lot of stimulation.

LD - Hands are a very common and expressive motive in your gellages.

MM - That's also related to the fact that I photograph myself. We normally see ourselves only as hands. That's what's in our operating field, so to say, what we see the most: the world around us and our hands. And, I at least, also take hands as a symbolic expression of the interconnectedness of the spiritual and material worlds; with hands the spirit influences the surrounding, material world. That's for instance where the intertwined hands motive came from. There, the basic or fundamental function of the hands is turned upside down; the grasping of material becomes a limitation and forms a barrier; bars which don´t let us into the open space behind, beyond the form.

LD - What role does space or working with space play in your work?

MM - Definitely an essential one. I've also changed its use. Initially, I used it in a negative demarcation. Those were the closed spaces that surround the figure and confine it. Later it's followed with emphasised perspective, third dimension, volume. And in the most recent photographs I´m trying to get light into the picture as another, transcendental dimension.

LD - I see another problem in the concept of the picture as a photograph and the picture as a painting. I have a feeling that for a photographer the painting-picture photograph is something like a composed piece of reality transposed to a different reality. The function of the background as a carrier to which the painting/image is connected is rather secondary. However, for a painter the background plays a very significant role, because the actual painting is in a certain way the content of how the painter moves on the surface

MM - This digression from classical photography towards painting interests me more from the technical side. Gellage has something extra compared to classical photograph and that´s structure. Real, physical structure which you can perceive by touch. And one other thing that is very important to me is the history of the origin of each picture; the fact that I enter the process of its making with my hands and that the final form (or shape) comes into being with me standing there, manipulating and thereby creating the picture. And all the photographic work prior to that, was primarily just preparation; essential but preparation nevertheless. And the actual „act of creation" is similar to a piece of clay which you use for sculpting. And that´s the primary difference between photography and gellage, that´s the collage in the word „gellage".

JŠ - I think your work is closer to painting or graphic art rather than photography. I perceive the modelling of the shape. The figures are deformed in various ways in the way of paintings.

MM - Yes, but I would say watch out here. The photograph history of the origin of gellage is as it were formal with respect to the final picture. But at the same time it's very important to me in that it enables me to have contact with the physical reality. By pressing the button on the camera I catch and freeze one moment from the continual time which I then transpose and bring to life again. By soaking it and removing it from the base, for a short moment, I enable it to continue in time again. It's as if I branched out reality into some self-existing world which lives at least for a short while in the process of the birth of a gellage (before it dries up and dies again). This way I can combine shots from different time periods and put them into a new context in a new common time. For example, these groups here; they're three individual shots of a figure, three moments in time and I put them together here into a new space, new time and new circumstances. I free them from all previous relations and give them a new life. And everything, the whole history has meaning for me. In this respect photography is present much more than formally.

LD - From what you just said it seems that for you the form which refers the viewer mainly towards photography is only some sort of technological necessity. Perhaps that's because you haven't found another form for you message (for what you want to communicate).

MM - It's hard to define it or to delimitate it in this manner. In addition, the photographic connection with reality interests me on another level. You can say that with paintings there is a connection with reality through the painter. Yes, but on a photograph you can catch even that which you aren't aware of not only consciously but also subconsciously. You take a picture of a landscape, come home, develop the film and only on the photograph you find something you weren't aware of before. So in a certain sense, you observe by record a situation or a relationship with which you then work and which you then investigate. The fact that I am the actual object is much more interesting to me. It's, in essence, a road to self-discovery, to growth (and development). In fact, I see art as the road to self-knowledge and I think that's common.

JŠ - I´m convinced that without it you cannot create. One can see it in your work in the curve that goes from the first, open head all the way to the actual head which appears in your latest pieces. We always create from what we're experiencing and we try to move it towards some sort of perfection both in form and content. In your most recent work I see much more feeling than at the beginning. And I think it's also a reflection of what you're going through.

MM - Certainly. And that confirms my conviction that art is a road to self-discovery. For me a work of art, be it a photograph or anything else is an expression of some deeper, subconscious or beyond-consciousness spheres of being to which we don´t have access otherwise. And only through a manifestation in the physical sphere in the form of a painting, a poem etc. we can grasp these with the help of our senses and through the senses with our consciousness. Therefore, I create something so that I like it, so that it corresponds to my emotions, that is to my subconsciousness and only then can I explore it. And it really works that way for me; with things that I did earlier, I only understood what they actually meant after a certain while. First time I recognited it clearly on the first triplet of the gellages of torn heads. When I made them I took them as a formal trifle. Only after three years, after one strong experience in a changed state of mind,did I see their meaning. I grasped that this are in fact three aspects of the one turning point: emotional, rational and tough.

JŠ - I would come back to the last works which I feel, that in comparison with earlier works are much more intimate,i.e. deep and inner, that the form is not in the first plan any more. Feeling is rather emerging. And I think, that important role plays in the background which you made more simple and quiet and so you rather get into the inner world. You are probably again experienced something, or you have moved somewhere because at no other photo does light play so important role as the latest.